Incumbent protection is prime target / Competition should be the goal in redistricting

John H. Bunzel

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, July 10, 2005

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, left, talks to reporters about the redistricting plan he unveiled at a Capitol news conference in Sacramento, Caif., Tuesday, June 28, 2005. Lowenthal's plan calls for a constituional amendment that would take the power to draw legislative and congressional districts away from the Legislature and give it to a seven-member commission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) Ran on: 06-29-2005
State Sen. Alan Lowenthal's proposal would take redistricting power away from the Legislature. less

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, left, talks to reporters about the redistricting plan he unveiled at a Capitol news conference in Sacramento, Caif., Tuesday, June 28, 2005. Lowenthal's plan calls for a ... more

Photo: RICH PEDRONCELLI

Photo: RICH PEDRONCELLI

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State Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, left, talks to reporters about the redistricting plan he unveiled at a Capitol news conference in Sacramento, Caif., Tuesday, June 28, 2005. Lowenthal's plan calls for a constituional amendment that would take the power to draw legislative and congressional districts away from the Legislature and give it to a seven-member commission. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) Ran on: 06-29-2005
State Sen. Alan Lowenthal's proposal would take redistricting power away from the Legislature. less

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, left, talks to reporters about the redistricting plan he unveiled at a Capitol news conference in Sacramento, Caif., Tuesday, June 28, 2005. Lowenthal's plan calls for a ... more

Photo: RICH PEDRONCELLI

Incumbent protection is prime target / Competition should be the goal in redistricting

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San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat who is returned to Congress every two years because she is an incumbent occupying a safe House seat. If I lived in her district, I (as a Democrat) would vote for her, too.

Even if Pelosi ran in a truly competitive district, she would win going away. She has been a popular and effective representative in a city where there aren't many Republican voters (around 20 percent voted for President Bush in 2004).

She is also a prominent leader of the Democratic Party, as well as House minority leader, who has always believed in reform as an important progressive goal.

Topping the priorities in Democrats' long-standing commitment to institutional reform should be a call for an end to the incumbent protection racket. It should be an all-out effort to make competition a major requirement in congressional and state legislative redistricting.

Democrats have long championed the concept of one person, one vote established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Baker v. Carr. The decision also required equal representation in all legislative bodies in order to reflect the interests and wishes of the people in a fair and balanced manner.

The reality has been just the reverse. The court-ordered mandate to reflect the popular will has been subverted by the conscious decisions of legislators to exert partisan control by creating safe election districts for themselves. As Ed Kilgore, vice president of the Democratic Leadership Council has put it, "Politicians are choosing voters, rather than voters choosing politicians."

In California, both Democrats and Republicans have joined together in an openly self-serving agreement to protect every incumbent from a serious competitive race. This blatant gerrymandering tends to disenfranchise independent voters who might choose to cross party lines to support a preferred candidate.

Furthermore, as Kilgore emphasizes, it increases the power of the extremes of both parties and the "ever-growing and ever more toxic partisan and ideological polarization of American politics."

The rapid decline in competitive districts is especially clear in the House of Representatives, where the number of safe seats rose from 281 in 1992 to 356 in 2002.

Congressional elections expert Gary Jacobson of UC San Diego says that just 15 seats were considered real tossups in 2002. It was even worse in 2004 when only three incumbents lost outside of Texas, where a mid-decade redistricting manipulated by Republicans drove out four Democratic incumbents.

The decrease in political competition has also spread to state legislative redistricting. Incumbent protection can be virtually guaranteed because legislators are drawing their own maps to ensure re-election.

In California, where the most recent redistricting was controlled by the Democrats, not one incumbent candidate for the Legislature lost in 2004.

Redistricting reform is an uphill struggle. Apart from determining which map-drawing principles to follow in creating truly competitive districts, it's not easy to assemble a nonpartisan redistricting body.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger supports a measure on the Nov. 8 ballot that would hand the responsibility to an independent commission of retired judges. The Democrats, who oppose his plan, have proposed that the Legislature appoint four of the seven commission members.

Republicans immediately criticized that plan because "it does not put enough distance between the Legislature and the commission."

There is no single, ideal way to change an entrenched system that has encouraged partisan incumbent protection. But the experience of other states shows that it can be done. One thing is not in dispute: Redistricting proposals are not popular with legislators because they don't want to give up their power.

The most compelling reason for reform-minded progressive Democrats to join with organizations like Common Cause in seeking to change the system in California is that, as Peter Ross Range, editor of Blueprint magazine, has pointed out, it will significantly restrict the "self-promoting impulses of politicians" of either party by removing "the stranglehold on electoral competition."

There is an additional argument for competitive districts that should drive home an important lesson for the leaders of both parties.

An analysis of California elections since 1992, as reported by Catherine Hazelton of UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies (Public Affairs Report, Spring 2005), shows that both Democratic and Republican women are more likely to run for and win competitive seats than for seats that are sure winners or losers. Among the reasons: Women face major barriers to running for safe seats, including the old boys' network.

Women comprise less than a third of the state Assembly. Democratic women hold 40 percent of their party's seats, and Republican women hold 19 percent of theirs. In the last decade or so, as Hazelton has noted, the growth in the number of women in the Legislature seems to have stalled, perhaps because "there are now fewer competitive seats than in previous years."

The political message is clear. Restructuring the redistricting process by creating competitive districts will not only improve the election possibilities of women candidates but also signal a determination to fix the "broken pieces of our political system."